150 Years and Still Dismal!
By David M. Levy
David Levy is a professor of economics at George Mason University.
In December 1849 Thomas Carlyle published “Occasional Discourse on the Negro
Question” in the London monthly Fraser’s Magazine. In it he labeled the economics of
his contemporaries “the dismal science.” In the next issue of Fraser’s, the greatest
British economist of that era, John Stuart Mill, responded. That brief exchange—it
counts less than 20 pages—is at the very heart of the nature and significance of
classical British economics.
While everyone has heard that economics is the “dismal science,” almost no one in
economics these days seems to know what aroused Carlyle’s ire. The failing is not
Carlyle’s; he is as clear as can be as to what exactly is the problem with economics.
It stands opposed to racial slavery. In the passage I quote next—which contains the
first use of “dismal science” in the language—the only fact that a modern reader
lacks is that Exeter Hall was the heart of organized Evangelicalism, the moral center
of the British antislave movement:
Truly, my philanthropic friends, Exeter Hall Philanthropy is wonderful; and the Social Science—
not a “gay science,” but a rueful [one]—which finds the secret of this universe in “supply-and-
demand,” and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone, is also
wonderful. Not a “gay science,” I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary,
desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of
eminence, the dismal science. These two, Exeter Hall Philanthropy and the Dismal Science, led
by any sacred cause of Black Emancipation, or the like, to fall in love and make a wedding of
it,—will give birth to progenies and prodigies; dark extensive moon-calves, unnameable
abortions, wide-coiled monstrosities, such as the world has not seen hitherto!*
* [Thomas Carlyle], “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine for
Town and Country, December 1849, pp. 672-73.
Much of the rest is unprintable in this respectable periodical; it reads like the vile racist screed
it is. Nonetheless, if one can bear the racial pornography, Carlyle makes a point of vital
importance: the economics of his contemporaries in its idealization of market relationships
among equals stands in opposition to his dream of slavery’s hierarchical obedience.
Too often soft-pedaled by those who admire his attack on economics, Carlyle was the premier
theorist of the idealized slave society. In opposition to the economists’ supply-and-demand
model of human society, he put forward the doctrine of obedience to one’s betters. While he
had been making such arguments through the 1840s, it wasn’t until the “Negro Question” that
he realized that all white people are “better” than all black people. This certainly made the
idealized slavery more attractive for white Britons than one in which they might be on the
cutting end of the “beneficent whip”—a phrase in “Negro Question” that Mill singled out for
particular attention.
Carlyle idealized slavery in the same way economists idealized markets. To match the
economists’ claim of mutual gain from exchange, Carlyle put forward the doctrine of the joys
of service to one’s betters. And according to the way things were supposed to work, the
common religion would give the details of the hierarchy. (This is why Carlyle and his admirers
often had “problems” with Jews; in particular, why we find the Anglo-German writer H. S.
Chamberlain cited in Mein Kampf for his rants on the subject.)
Then and now, justification of slavery by any name assumes the benevolence of masters. It is
with respect to the claim that slavery is a more benevolent institution than markets that I
propose we read the sexual references in the “dismal science” passage quoted above. One of
the most effective pieces of economic analysis of the time was Harriet Martineau’s
demarcation of the hidden economics of interracial sexuality in the American south. This
demonstration, when retold in fictional form in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, devastated the pretensions
to slavery owners’ benevolence.
The lack of public prostitution in southern cities—a fact that had been pointed to as evidence
of the moralizing effect of slavery in the debates of the time—was explained by Martineau’s
extension of classical population theory. Why would a man rent a woman by the hour when he
could buy her and keep the children for resale? Colored children, after all, followed the status
of their mother. Slave concubinage replaced public prostitution. After Martineau, everyone
knew how to see this. And by seeing this, one knew all there was to know about the
benevolence of those with absolute power over the lives and persons of their subjects.
Interpreting the Facts
When we view the past through the lazy status quo of the present, we are liable to take as
conservative those forces that helped effect this status quo regardless of the direction in which
the world was moved. Economists who helped end racial slavery are in modern accounts
judged reactionaries by modern readers who find it impossible to imagine that anyone of
intelligence and integrity would defend racial slavery. With this failure of imagination comes
the inescapable conclusion that the only possible direction from which classical economics can
be attacked by someone serious is from the pro-socialist direction.
Of course this failure of imagination is aided and abetted by strategic silence. If a student
knows the Carlyle-Mill debate, it is impossible to think of the classical economists as taking the
reactionary side in the Victorian debate over social organization. The alternative to markets
was not socialism. There were socialist experiments, but there were no socialist economies.
The alternative to market organization was slavery. Teachers have to work rather hard to hide
this fact. For instance, when students in classes in British literature encounter Charles
Dickens’s 1854 Hard Times, with its savage attack on markets and market economics,
teachers wishing to present Dickens as “progressive” have to be careful. When they explain
why it is “inscribed to Thomas Carlyle,” it is probably helpful to their cause if they not mention
that in 1853 Carlyle republished an expanded version of his part of the exchange with Mill
under the title Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question. What would modern students
think if they knew that the attack on market transactions came from those who idealized
slavery for black people?
The Carlyle-Mill debate was a theoretical debate. Ideas do have consequences. The issues
stopped being purely theoretical in what historians call the “Governor Eyre controversy” of
mid-1860s Britain. What ought we to do about those responsible for an administrative
massacre of nonwhite Jamaicans? On the side demanding colorblind justice we find the old
coalition Carlyle opposed, antislave Evangelicals and economists now joined by Charles Darwin
and T. H. Huxley. In opposition we find all the major antimarket voices in Victorian literature—
Dickens, John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, and Alfred Tennyson—joining Carlyle in making the
case that it could not be murder to kill Jamaicans of color because one could only murder
people.
The defeat of the Evangelical-economic coalition was complete. Eyre walked; Mill lost his seat
in Parliament; the century of administrative massacre began. And the episode is never
mentioned when in English classes the stories of the progressive literary figures and the
heartless economists are retold.
One of these days students will learn how to read the silence between the lines.